Senior AI Engineer - Agentic AI Platform | Hybrid (Dallas, TX or Chicago, IL) | Contract-to-Hire

Pay range: $70-$85/HR (DOE and C2C vs W2)  

Join a large, data-driven enterprise organization building a next-generation agentic AI platform from the ground up. This isn't a single-agent project -- it's a foundational platform effort that will let business and engineering teams across the company build, deploy, and operate AI agents on a shared, secure, and observable enterprise backbone. If you want to shape how an entire organization does agentic AI -- not just ship one agent -- this is that role.

Hybrid onsite Tuesday-Thursday, based in either Dallas, TX or Chicago, IL.

• Architect and build reusable platform services that support multiple agent frameworks, models, and business domains -- not one-off agent solutions.

• Establish standard patterns for how agents register, discover each other, execute tasks, manage memory/state, and interoperate across systems.

• Design multi-agent orchestration using event-driven and workflow-based approaches, including routing, task delegation, retries, and failure handling.

• Build a centralized gateway for AI model calls, agent tools, and external service integrations, with consistent auth, throttling, and policy enforcement baked in.

• Stand up full observability for agentic systems: distributed tracing, metrics, dashboards, and visibility into agent decisions, tool calls, latency, and failures.

• Build automated evaluation pipelines -- benchmarks, regression tests, guardrails -- that keep agent quality and safety in check as the platform scales.

• Partner closely with architecture, security, and governance teams to bake in responsible-AI and secure-by-design practices from day one.

• 5+ years of software engineering experience, with meaningful hands-on time building AI/ML or agentic applications that made it to production (not just prototypes).

• Strong Python skills and real experience designing APIs, microservices, or event-driven/distributed systems.

• Practical experience with LLM-based systems: agent design patterns, prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation, and tool/model integration.

• Hands-on experience with at least one agent or orchestration framework (LangGraph, LangChain, Semantic Kernel, AutoGen, CrewAI, or similar) -- we care more about depth of use than which one.

• Solid grounding in cloud platforms, containers, CI/CD, and production support practices.

• Observability chops: structured logging, metrics, tracing, alerting.

• A self-directed, curious engineer who can ramp on new tools and problem domains without needing a formal onboarding path.

• Bachelor's degree in a technical field or equivalent practical experience.

Nice to have: OpenTelemetry or similar distributed-tracing implementation experience, prior work building model/tool gateways or shared platform services, exposure to LLM/agent evaluation and red-teaming practices, and background in regulated or data-intensive enterprise environments.

• Contract type: W2 or CSC - Contract-to-Hire or Contract

• Schedule: Hybrid -- onsite Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday

• Location: Dallas, TX or Chicago, IL metro

• Interview process: Technical video screening required for all candidates (camera on, no headphones during screening)
  
  
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